In today's digital environment people store content on a variety of different devices. Traditionally, content was stored in private infrastructure such as corporate networks, which typically comprise personal computers (PCs) interconnected with one or more file servers over a local- or wide-area network. While various solutions exist for obtaining remote access to some content stored in private infrastructure, there is still no elegant solution for obtaining access to and/or sharing of any and every piece of content stored in private infrastructure. For example, there are no elegant solutions to obtaining remote access to data stored in the PCs located behind the firewall of a corporate network, short of synchronizing the data in the PCs with a network server (or enforcing corporate policy to preclude storing content on the PC in the first instance). Likewise, it is not convenient to remotely access content stored on one's firewalled home PCs outside the house. Furthermore, even if one is able to access such content, it is not convenient to share such content with third persons short of email or other file transfer solution.
In response to these issues, public infrastructure has become more prevalent over the past several years. This infrastructure, such as cloud storage provided to the public by services such as Google Drive™, Dropbox™, and Microsoft OneDrive™, allows individual consumers and/or organizations to store content on infrastructure owned by a third party, making it easier to access such content while mobile and/or share such content with third parties without having to email or otherwise transfer the content between devices. The problem with public infrastructure, however, is that for this solution to be truly effective the content must be stored on the public infrastructure which is troublesome if the majority of one's content is in fact stored on private infrastructure because of the necessity and inconvenience of synchronizing content between public and private infrastructure. There is an also an issue with respect to the security risks that can arise in trusting a third party to secure one's important confidential information.
Consequently, with the prevalence of public infrastructure such as cloud storage, the prevalence of private infrastructure such as PC networks and network storage devices, and the prevalence of mobile devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones, a person, and more particularly an organization, typically stores content on a wide variety of different systems and devices
It would be desirable, therefore, to have a system which allows users to access and share content from any device, whether the content is stored on servers, PCs, public cloud storage, file transfer protocol (FTP), network attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) devices.